Epilogue - Three Months Later
Steel
The chopper landed gently on its target, and the men quietly filed out and headed for the elevator.
A previous client needed an escort through several Middle Eastern countries.
While it was something they normally would have passed on to the traditional, visible team members the company employed, they knew with all the changes happening, this was the last chance for the six of them to go into the field together.
Nemo and Scheherazade had even flown in specially to go with them.
As a group, they entered and hit the floor to the armory to dump their gear and clean up before heading to their families.
Steel was the last one out of the locker room, and when he headed for the elevator, he stopped short. Waters, TB, Nemo, Scheherazade, Demon, and Midas were all standing there, waiting for him. They’d been gone already for at least twenty minutes, so he was confused as to why they were still here.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “You all should be upstairs already.”
“Not this time,” Waters said. “This time, we all go to the lobby together.”
His mouth opened to say it wasn’t necessary. He’d just go to his apartment like always, but no sound came out.
“It’s about time you had your own ‘triumphant return,’” TB said softly.
When the tradition started—the women meeting their men in the lobby after a project—it had just been Waters, Kubrick, TB, and Flame. Nemo had left to go work with Gem, but when they were around Tribe, they took part in the ritual.
For a while, it hadn’t been so bad when it was Demon, Midas, and Steel missing out together.
But these last few months, it had only been him not being welcomed home.
Although he knew he could go and the girls would be thrilled to see him, it hadn’t felt right.
It had been a couples’ thing. He had never said to anyone that it bothered him, but obviously, they knew it had hurt to not be a part of it.
Choked up with emotion, he waved them off. “It’s okay. Daleyza won’t know the tradition. You all go up.”
Nemo moved behind him and hustled him onto the elevator, with the others filling in around them. “Dude. You honestly think the girls won’t have filled her in?”
Trying to make it seem like it didn’t matter, he shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Even if they did, it’s not really her style. She’s… independent.”
Waters gave a bark of laughter. “And Kubrick isn’t? She still moves heaven and earth to be there, even if she’s on a shoot.”
He wasn’t wrong. One time, she’d been on a film site but had left the location to fly home, greet Waters, then, after a twelve-hour “welcome home celebration,” had gotten back on a plane to go back to work.
“Are you scared she won’t be there?” Midas asked.
The doors to the elevator closed. Someone pushed the button for the lobby. He broke out into a sweat watching the numbers change.
He glanced at Midas, unable to speak.
“She’ll be there,” his teammate assured him. “I’ll bet an entire shipment of NikNaks on it.”
“I’ll raise my share,” Nemo offered.
“Me too,” Demon said.
Waters and TB added their agreements.
“You want to take those odds, Nostradamus?” Midas asked with a grin.
Prior to accepting Waters’ offer, as he lay in the muck and grime of that sewer in Nicaragua, he’d been working alone, hiding behind a double life.
Here at Tribe was the only place he’d ever felt part of something, and even for the past seven years, he’d still felt a partial sense of separateness.
Granted, he’d put up those walls himself, but at this moment?
Those walls with these men were gone, as if they’d been merely lines drawn in the sand that he’d refused to cross. This was his family.
And then there was Daleyza. His belleza.
Over the six weeks he’d had with her back home before this past project, he began to see her in a whole new light. To him, she’d always been a victim of circumstance. A pawn in her family’s machinations, then again with the Colonel Cartel.
Come to find, she had never needed a protector.
She could do that just fine on her own and had since long before the day their families bound them to one another.
Not only that, in her own way, she had been protecting him.
She had known the tightrope he walked. Had understood what he was doing and kept his secrets.
Had stayed out of the way so he could do what he needed to do to shield her and their son from the darkest side of the cartel.
She’d been his silent partner then. Could he trust himself—not her, because she’d proven herself there—to let her help him again?
As they’d reentered the hell of their past in Argentina, she had helped him reduce his walls to nothing more than the posts buried deep within him.
Posts he’d planted darkly and deeply to keep the monster in its prison.
The things he’d done for his blood family, and afterward, that made him feel unworthy of a good life.
Definitely unworthy of her. But if she was there in that lobby, he’d take it as a sign that she was able to help him uproot those posts and deal with whatever slime crawled out of the holes.
Time seemed to stretch as the elevator dinged, signaling they’d arrived at their destination, and the door opened into the lobby. All the men stepped back from Steel, leaving him by himself at the entrance.
Glancing out into the lobby, he saw all the women and children, huge smiles on their faces.
A few of the kids held pictures they’d drawn or other things they had to give their fathers.
A chorus of “Welcome home!” rang out. Midas’ girls, Shakira and Ona, with Gem’s help, had gotten into Nemo’s confetti cannon stash, and all three set them off at once, showering everyone with colorful paper pieces.
His brain registered the commotion, but his eyes were glued to the woman in the center of the line.
Daleyza. Belleza. She was here.
Someone gave him a gentle shove out of the elevator.
When he was standing by himself in the center of the lobby, all the children and women came up to him to hug him and welcome him home personally. As families were reunited, they got into the elevators and headed to their apartments here at Tribe.
Daleyza was the last to step up to him, her hand brushing over the laceration at his left temple. “Decided you needed a matching set to the one you got in Argentina?”
“You can thank Scheherazade for that. Rabbit looked like a terrorist, I guess, and she ran right in front of me. Knocked me into a metal pipe.”
“Okay, otherwise?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The last few Tribe members entered the carriage and disappeared, but Steel and Daleyza still stood in the center of the lobby. He’d never been so nervous in all his life. No idea why. But she’d been here, waiting for him. Nothing felt more right in his world at this moment.
Someone had sent the elevator back down to them, and the ding of the bell broke their stare.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Just for the sight of you.”
A blush spread quickly across her cheeks, and she looked down at her hands in front of her.
A laugh hid behind his voice. “Are you embarrassed, belleza?”
“It’s just…”
“Just what?”
She rolled her eyes, gave a little huff, and transferred her weight to one foot as she crossed her arms. “The women. They had a bet going on how you’d react to your first official welcome home. They put it on Midas’ board and everything.”
He laughed in earnest now. “Kubrick’s doing, I’m guessing. I’m surprised they didn’t start betting on the men sooner.” He stepped up closer to her. “What were the options?”
“Kubrick said you’d carry me off to the shower.”
“Think that’s sort of a one-and-done thing for us.”
“Gem said we wouldn’t make it out of the elevator, and everyone should be prepared to walk several flights of stairs for the next twenty-four hours.”
“Has merit.” He put a hand behind her neck and pulled her close, snaking the other arm around her waist to anchor her in place. “Flame?”
“Handcuff me to the bed so I couldn’t run away.”
His forehead touched hers, as did the tip of his nose. “Lost the key. You’d be stuck there for quite a while. What did Cherry guess?”
“Something I can’t repeat.”
He turned his head, tapped his ear, and put it close to her mouth.
Her blush deepened, but she stood on tiptoe and whispered it to him.
“Hmm. She got that from Demon. Loves his food play. Might have to try that sometime, but no. That just leaves Mouse.”
“She wanted you to recreate some scene from one of Flame’s books. That girl…” She giggled. “She reads too much.”
“When Midas was recovering, she read Flame’s books out loud to him.” Gathering all of Daleyza’s hair in his hands, he pulled it free of the ponytail and gently threaded his fingers through it, letting it fall around her shoulders. “Did you bet on me?” he whispered as his lips brushed against hers.
They traded soft kisses. Nothing long. Nothing overt. Just repeated exchanges, focusing on the ability to touch one another again. His heart felt like it was overflowing. Or maybe he hadn’t realized how empty it had been, and it was just filling.
“I don’t have to bet on you. I know exactly how you’d want to celebrate.”
His hand slid to her chest, then upward to her throat, his fingers closing around it like a collar.
She gasped at the slight pressure, her pupils widening, her pulse racing beneath his touch.
He backed her into the elevator, his eyes never leaving hers, not when the elevator door closed behind them, not when it began its ascent to the sixth floor, and not when it opened to let them off.
At their door, he keyed in his code, but he didn’t let go of her right away. “Inside. Bedroom. Naked. Ass up.”
Only then did he let go, giving her a gentle shove to the foyer.
She turned immediately and headed toward the bedroom, her hands already working to shed her clothes.